EVENTS

More perks of the tenure track

Now Todd Starnes has republished his hit piece on Town Hall — he seems to be dumping it on lower and lower levels of the self-devouring far right internet. Although, I do have to say that the comments are becoming even more entertaining.

Yes, there are conservative students at Morris. And Myers thinks he should be entitled to hunt them down and kill them. Talk about a sanctimonious jerk.

I want to hunt conservative students? Do I need to get a license, is there a specific season, and is there a bag limit?

Alas, once again, we have a rabid commenter who didn’t bother to read my article. Why should he, when Todd Starnes has told him what’s in it?

He’s a pompous fool, a bully, a merciless self-promoter, and a lousy excuse for a human being. He’s also a state employee who should be terminated immediately and barred from further public. . .um. . .service. Indeed, he should’ve been fired six years ago, when, in another act of scientific inquiry, he desecrated the Eucharist. But as an associate professor, he’s tenured, and absolutely no one would touch him if he strolled into the North Star offices, shot the editor between the eyes, and posted the video on YouTube.

I CAN DO THAT? When I get home, I’m going to have to check my employment contract — I don’t remember seeing that in there. Maybe it’s in the fine print.

Never let it be said that the fever swamp of the right wing has any connection with reality at all.

You do not want to hunt and kill conservative students for food, however. You need to boil them for hours and hours and they still come out like shoe leather. Plus, they have a really nasty aftertaste. Must be all that bile they keep in themselves.

I hope someone some of the asks some of the putative candidates for high office their opinion on these outrageous actions of this renegade biology professor.
that would be even more entertaining!
uncle frogy

On the topic of shooting people in the face because of ideology. I can think of quite a few examples of right-wing terrorism in the US, but on the left end of things I can only think of PETA. I then did some google finger walking and can easily find more incidences of right-wing than left wing. Yes, this certainly isn’t scientific, but it is indicative.

So based purely on the left-or-right spectrum, who is more likely to walk into a room of other-affiliated people and open fire? I think this guy’s projecting.

Whoa! Professors can kill students? Is this just tenured profs or does the right extend to post docs? Are people only allowed to kill people down the academic hierarchy? Can a PhD student kill an undergrad? How does it work with industrial consultants and partners? Can I kill a prof who comes to consult for my company or can he kill me? Does it change if I’m in charge of deciding who gets industrial funding?

Dr. PZeevil. He has one simple request. Zebra fish sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads! But with the grant economy the way it is, he may have to settle for ill-tempered mutated ones.

I was reading Google News yesterday when I came across the Fox News article about PZ. Talk about faux outrage. The article was proof that Fox is anything but “fair and balanced”. Just more of the propaganda that Fox has become so adept and putting out.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

CD #14
It’s a Discworld reference (originally literature, but several of the books have been adapted to film with varying degrees of quality and fidelity). In Ankh-Morpork, the Assassin’s Guild is legally recognized, and a member of the Guild killing someone for money is not legally counted as murder and will not attract the attention of the police. (Killing someone for money while not being a Guild member will attract the attention of the police if you’re lucky; if you’re not, it will attract the attention of the Guild first, and they do not like competition).

Weapons grade projection. To my knowledge PZ has never suggested or even advocated violence toward anyone. From the comments he’s shared, hundreds have at the least wished violence on him. It’s to the point that if this blog is quiet for more than a day, I get worried for him.

Alas, once again, we have a rabid commenter who didn’t bother to read my article. Why should he, when Todd Starnes has told him what’s in it?

Read it? Why would he read it? Like many on the Right Wing, he apparently prefers his information pre-digested and would never think of bestirring himself to look at the original source material. Hmmm…much like religious folk.

“The Alliance Defending Freedom has accused Myers, an associate professor in the school’s biology program, of encouraging people to steal and throw away a copy of the November 22nd edition of the newspaper.”

Start with The Color of Magic followed by The Light Fantastic then any “line” will make sense.

Also, There are 3 mini-series made from Discworld novels I have seen: two good and one horrible. The horrible one is the The Color of Magic. But Hogfather and Going Postal are hilarious and very much in the spirit of the books.

As for RWNs and comparisons to Discworld, when life imitates art, it’s amusing, but when real-life imitates Discworld that mixes in some pathos with the unintentional comedy.

So what the hell is “Townhall”? The original fox piece had differing opinions but this is blather-react 100%. Um some weird comments that make no-sense.

I have heard that this so call professor has pictures of 0bama adorning his “throne room”…the word is out

Huh? I can’t even comprehend what that means.

This professor is a pompous fool. Did he spout off in a “Free Speech Zone”. If not he should be fined and sent to the corner with a dunce cap.

Free speech isn’t allowed in a place except in free-speech zones? Weird view of the world and … what the *heck* is the first commentor’s reading comprehension? How do you get from “Conservative students are assholes” to “I’m entitled to hunt conservatives and kill them”? Seriously, HOW?

sadunlap
I’m going to have to absolutely contradict your recommendation there (although I agree that the mini-series adaptation of Color of Magic was an atrocity. I haven’t found the time to watch the other two live action ones yet. Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters were made into excellent animated mini-series (by a now-defunct studio, unfortunately)). It’s been my experience that many people who thoroughly enjoy the series as a whole gain no pleasure whatsoever from the first two books, and I generally recommend that anyone who isn’t already a devotee of Fritz Leiber, Robert Howard, L Sprague De Camp and/or other pulp sword and sorcery writers from that era give them a miss entirely, or read them later for the sake of completeness.

Here in the antipodes Colour Bond is the brand name of pre-painted corrugated tin sheets. They’re used for roofing and siding. My house has “Loft” (sorta dark eggplant colour) siding and “Evening Haze” roofing. That sentence was so hard for me to parse that I had to go caffeinate myself in order to make sense of it. /comment as pointless as that of your average RWA

One extra note on the Discworld and Assassin’s Guild lines of thought: it should also be noted that the Assassin’s Guild also had some of the best training and finishing schools in Ankh-Morpork, to the point where a number of richer families apprenticed their children to the Assassin’s Guild long enough to get an education, then pulled them out. The Guild didn’t mind at all, as that was one of their more regular sources of cash.

Maybe somebody thinks PZ trained at one of the Assassin’s Guild chapterhouse schools.

Townhall is a website where basically the crankiest of right-wing writers like to post a few articles. Often the people who post on Townhall have writing gigs aside from just writing on Townhall. Or are political pundits of some kind. It isn’t exclusively for the little nobody bloggers: Townhall is for middle tier conservative hacks republishing their bilge. As you can imagine and as you have seen, their comment sections are Youtube comment caliber.

The wikipedia article mentions the following people having contributed to Townhall at one point:
Dinesh D’Souza
Ann Coulter
Michael Savage
Jeb Bush
Jonah Goldberg
Michelle Malkin

I’m sure by now PZ has elevated himself to the level of a Public Figure at least regarding this discourse. This means that to be defamatory a statement must not only be false and maligning but also made in a reckless and/or negligent manner. I’m sure at Faux News they’re well aware of how to stay on their side of that line.

However, maybe those responsible for the North Star aren’t so aware; so let’s hope they spool out sufficient rope to hang themselves.

Seconding Dalillama at #44 on the Pratchett reading order – DO NOT READ THE FIRST TWO BOOKS IN THE SERIES AS YOUR INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES.
.
I missed out on approximately 15 years where I could have been gleefully rereading my Discworld books until they fell apart because somebody loaned me The Colour Of Magic & The Light Fantastic when I was 20, and although I had in fact done a fair amount of the classic sword & sorcery reading required to get most of the puns and parodies, it just didn’t leave me hungry for more. Then in my mid-30s someone lent me a copy of Wyrd Sisters because they knew I liked Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and Shakespearian stuff, and from then on I was irreversibly hooked.

I like the l-space reading guide with its multiple entry points. One of the great advantages of the Discworld oeuvre is that it’s not essential to read them in publication order. Knowing Crip Dyke as I do, I suspect that starting with the Witches books is most likely to be her cup of tea.

+++
Yeah, projection, pure and simple.
Killing people, wanting to kill people, advocating for killing people (while still denying it, sometimes), advocating for more guns to kill people is a decidedly right-wing hobby, especially in the USA.
Yes, there are probably a few left-wing terrorist. You can probably post an extensive list of them. For the last 30 years. Which is probably shorter that the one for right wing terrorism for this year…

This isn’t weapons grade projection, this is starship grade propulsion: Pointed in the same direction and projecting in unison, with a bit of careful focusing and a constant supply of faux outrage, you obtain enough thrust to achieve FTL velocities. And they are so dense the massive G‘s aren’t a problem.

WHAT? Hah! The first two books are among the best! Now you’re going to start saying DEATH is your favourite character and MORT is one of the best books, followed by telling people to skip Sourcery! Ah for those old days of the fresh and unapologetic fantasy mayhem with random deaths of the first two books!

Amusingly, the Fox News version of this article is censoring any mention of what North Star actually *did* to earn PZ’s anger.

I left a short, polite message informing them of how NS had used a crime-scene photo of Trayvon Martin’s body to mock affirmative action, and it never saw the light of day. (And a search for that name turns up nothing in the comments: you’d think *someone* would have mentioned it)

And this in an articled whining about the horrors of librul censorship.

How have so many people ended up with such a confused sense of morality?

Here in Oz a state premier accepted a bribe, lied about it in an investigation into the behaviour and then had to resign when evidence surfaced that he had done exactly what he was accused of. Our PM called him a great example of worthy humanity or some such. :(

@44, Dalillama, Schmott Guy; @55, tigtog, @60, =8)-DX
I also liked The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic an awful lot better than Mort. However, I could probably get behind recommending Equal Rites in favor of the first two.

Aw damn, I thought that was just the preview being weird. Apparently <cite> has some unusual styles applied to it. Let’s try that again, less semantically:

I also liked The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic an awful lot better than Mort. However, I could probably get behind recommending Equal Rites in favor of the first two.
My own introduction was actually Discworld Noir and The Wee Free Men.

@49 and @42 – perhaps the implication is that “pictures of Obama, in the bathroom” (as opposed to “pictures of Obama in the bathroom”) are PZ’s masturbation fodder? If not, I’m honestly not sure what else it could be.

Well shit. Somebody should have told me that tenure lets you kill people before I decided that starving to death on my own terms was a better choice than pursuing a career in teaching. No wonder those positions are so damn hard to get.

If you kill someone who is tenured and then yourself become tenured, does the career-advancement-via-murder then retroactively become acceptable? Basically, can we get murders grandfathered in? Maybe that goes against the spirit of things, but it seems like a nice way to keep freshnew blood in the system.

You are all deviant scum who should be tortured to death and burned for all eternity in the shittiest furnace of the most agonising hell.

Or in other words, how could anyone not recommend Nightwatch as the best Discworld novel and all the other books, whilst excellent (how dare anyone criticise them!!!!), can be considered build ups, or footnotes (appropriately Pratchettian) to it?

@Louis – to put this DW discussion in context: Vimes is exactly the kind of seedy character that was being maligned in the OP linked article: he got tenure. Pratchett should’ve killed him off long ago in the series, but no! Now that dude can do whatever he wants! (Analogies to cracker-eating anyone?) (only partially joking.. Nightwatch was good too =)

I second Louis! Nightwatch is a fantastic book. If you start with that you’ll be hooked for sure.

It’s simply this: a book about all of the nameless faceless grunts who populate the ranks of every fictional political entity. It’s riotously funny and as down-to-earth as mud — if fantasy usually turns you off, this is a book you will be delighted by repeatedly. It is also the origin story of the character Sam Vimes, whose combination of pragmatism, decency and wit seems like it would be a great pleasure for most Pharyngula regulars (and seems to have inspired more than one nym).

My only reservation about starting with Nightwatch is that you might have to reread it later to get a few jokes. There are constant cameos and references to other characters and other books which heighten the overall experience. If you are a quick reader, you might want to start with “Small Gods,” in which a fairly dull religious apprentice in an oppressive rural society receives a visitation from the gods in the form of a wise-cracking turtle who sends him on a…erm, pilgrimage. Hilarity ensues, but more importantly you get your first look at the world from the perspective of an uneducated “outsider.” A similar experience might be had from reading “Monstrous Regiment,” in which a girl from a rural area in a more bellicose nation decides to disguise herself as a boy and go off to war…only to discover that she’s not the only one in her unit who had the same idea. That one’s a great laugh for feminists, while I’d recommend “Small Gods” to any atheist, and particularly anyone who mistakenly suffered through a philosophy degree.

I’ve been a Discworld grognard since Pterry started publishing them, and not only did CoM and LM not put me off the series, but being a fan of Moorcock, Tolkien, and Gygax, I even liked the jokes. Different strokes, I guess. But I do second the recommendation for new readers to follow the L-Space map.

Meanwhile, when I reach a difficult part of my life, I try to pause, look into my heart and ask, “What would Lord Vetinari do?”

Just wow…”desecrating the Eucharist” is now a terminable offense? Further, tenured professors are immune from prosecution for murder?? The things you learn…about the delusional beliefs of your average RWNJ. Cripes, it’s just stunning some times. But then, as Todd Starnes is an irredeemable POS, I don’t really pay any attention when he starts throwing feces through the bars of his cage.

I think the “Free Speech Zone” might be a reference to the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada. Militia men who showed up with guns, (ready to shoot Bureau of Land Management officials), were provided with a Free Speech Zone by the BLM. This was clumsily done, but the BLM was trying to avoid armed conflict. The Militia men (and women) and Bundy himself were really insulted by the Free Speech Zone.

This story is not obscure on rightwing radio, TV and blogs. It is the red meat of the day.

In the case of commenters on the PZ story, I think the idea was that PZ should only have freedom of speech if he is in a Free Speech Zone. What liberals did to Bundy supporters (and by extension, to conservatives) should be done to PZ. Or something like that. It’s hard to tell with conservative commenters since they rely on dog whistles we don’t get, and their writing skills are not the best.

I think the “Free Speech Zone” might be a reference to the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada. Militia men who showed up with guns, (ready to shoot Bureau of Land Management officials), were provided with a Free Speech Zone by the BLM.

What liberals did to Bundy supporters (and by extension, to conservatives) should be done to PZ. Or something like that

WTF? I hadn’t heard this, but this was done and worse during years of protesting the Iraq war, sometimes the free speech zone was a mile from the event; I’d say it’s about damned time conservatives WERE finally treated like the liberals.

In reference to coffeehound’s comment #84: the Free Speech Zone the BLM set up was okay, and was an acceptable way to let protesters say what they wanted to say without blocking traffic or blocking law enforcement. There was some clumsy interaction with protestors that could have been avoided. However, Bundy and his militia buddies do not understand the free speech concept.

Also Bundy and his militia buddies amply demonstrated rightwing fantasies of shooting somebody in the forehead. Only they set up to do it for real. Very macho and freedom-loving of them, I’m sure.

The rightwing frequently projects their desire to shoot people onto liberals, as in the conspiracy theories that claim Obama was arming postal workers, or that Obama is planning to use other federal employees to put freedom-loving patriots in internment camps. That’s what they would like to do to liberals. They think we think like they do, that we have the same dreams.

BTW, Bundy’s “rights” as he calls them depend, in part, on a kind of tenure. He claims that since his ancestors grazed cattle there for generations, he has a right to continue to do so. Native Americans might disagree with him.

The most troubling aspect of this is that guys (and some women) with guns backed an old white mormon libertarian in his refusal to obey the law.

It’s been my experience that many people who thoroughly enjoy the series as a whole gain no pleasure whatsoever from the first two books

The first two books where pure mockery of the genre. They have some bits that, if done differently, would have made them better, and fit nicely into the world overall, but.. political commentary, and other clear satire wasn’t something really being tried for in them. Still, I liked them, and.. can almost forgive even the live action mini series, if they hadn’t crammed both bloody books into one series, then tacked on the Summoner of Eight’s temple, as an after thought, at the tail end, as some place the tourist had planned to see, but wasn’t able to (in the books, he and Rincewind more or less end up there by shear accident, and shear accident with the tourist’s picture box manages to scare off the squid like monster, swallowing the temple, and the surrounding landscape with it). It was neat to see it made into live action, but also.. rushed.

Going Postal they kind of did some of the same things with, opting to change up certain things a bit, to, I can only assume, fit it in the right time limit, and have it still make sense. The result was good enough that I didn’t catch on to all the “adjustments” they had made right off, until I went back and re-read the book. By comparison, the cartoons where much closer to the books, and.. I don’t think they did too much to mangle Hogsfather (which includes a nice bit at the end on human imagination, and the need to make shit up, including gods, or tooth fairies, and the like, for people to actually *be* human, while at the same time acknowledging that, yes, indeed, they are all *made up*).

@Lynna, OM #85: And, of course, they also project the desire onto imaginary roving gangs of Black people, which is why they need to be armed to the teeth both when at home and out about town. The present political reality is making me seriously question my position on thought crimes (never an okay concept), which I find deeply troubling in its own right. In an environment where we can’t manage to consistently convict overtly racist fanatics for present-day lynchings, though, otherwise-untenable authoritarianism starts looking disturbingly appealing to me. I think I need to take my meds and get a good night’s sleep.

Night Watch is my favourite Discworld novel, but I strongly disagree that it’s the first one you should read.

Start with Guards, Guards and read the City Watch series from there until you get to Night Watch. That way you get to see Vimes’ character arc and development along the way, and it’ll have the biggest impact.